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Sweet and Lo-Fi

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"Yeah, this is a well-recognized audience with some advertisers, but you really reach them when you're reaching them through them, because it's all about them," says Curry. ("Enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?") "This is going to be a huge community that is very tight-knit, thanks in no small part to Richard Bluestein. They're finally having their voices heard. It's so way different from Will & Grace."

As good as podcasting has been to gays and lesbians, Bluestein sees more potential in the vlogosphere.

"I think the podcasting medium is very open," he says. "But if you're talking about acceptance, I find the video blogging community much more accepting. Anything goes in video blogging."

"Some people are going to do home videos, and that's all they'll want to do," says Current TV's Sloan, whose network often airs submissions from video bloggers. "But some of the best stuff we've gotten is from people with these cameras or computers. It's stuff that mainstream media doesn't have the interest or focus to fill."

Which in turn speaks to the virtual medium's commercial viability.

"The potential for advertisers is being able to target a very niche market they wouldn't necessarily be able to get to," says Streeter. "Maybe a liquor distributor might be interested (in sponsoring Lo-Fi clips). They're kind of shut out of mainstream media, and I have a large community of people who have some commonality with how they consume things."

"It's been so under the radar that I don't think anyone's taken advantage of it nearly to what they could as an advertiser," offers St. Louis-based Core Audio/Visual designer Jason Stamp. "You're reaching a whole group that isn't watching prime-time TV that advertising people can't figure out how to get to anyway. Eventually somebody's going to pick up on that and sponsor viral movies, and it's going to make their product cooler. Once it happens once, it'll happen a thousand times. Advertising people will give it some catchy name, and you'll buy it like you'll buy any billboard.

"It used to be you had to go to years of schooling to get into the commercial realm," Stamp continues. "Now it's the idea that's king — whether you're in eighth grade or have years of experience. You can create these web movies wherever you are. If it's great, it's going to get swept up and seen around the world. And I don't think that's ever happened before."

KETC-TV's Patrick Murphy remembers his former pupil Bill Streeter thus: "He's got the skills that we've got, but he doesn't care. That's not where he's at."

While Murphy dismisses the notion that the vlogosphere poses a serious threat to mainstream television's market share, the local PBS producer does discern a compelling trend in terms of how vlogs and their ilk are affecting people's information-consumption habits.

"Video blogs represent, to me, a move from a mass audience to audiences that are much smaller and specialized," the producer explains. "It's this incredible democratization of media, with all the good and the bad that democracy involves. It sort of turns the model upside down in a lot of ways. In a broadcast operation, we're setting the schedule and you basically watch by appointment. With a video blog, you can visit it absolutely any time you want."

"We're in this transition away from mass media to custom media," agrees University of Missouri-St. Louis journalism professor Tom McPhail. "Advertisers are losing great demographics — and they can't capture them by advertising on mainstream television anymore, because they don't watch it. The whole area is up for grabs."

"This is all major, major stuff coming down the pipe," says Sreenath Sreenivasan, dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. "These are all eyeballs that are distracted by other stuff that used to look at me. So we have to play in that space somehow, and have our own equivalent of these things to figure it out.

"Big media didn't pay attention to bloggers until very late," Sreenivasan adds. "They're not making the same mistake with podcasts. They say: 'Send us your pictures, send us your video.' Some of the best stuff from the London bombings was from video blogs and cell phones. It's a rear-guard action against all this stuff."

Possibly the deftest appropriation of the medium to date came last month when NBC made a clip of a Saturday Night Live skit entitled "Lazy Sunday" available for free on a variety of video-sharing Web sites. The clip, a rap spoof billed as a "digital short" that had aired on SNL December 17, became an Internet sensation, clearing 1 million downloads within ten days (and providing an elusive silver lining to an otherwise painfully humorless season of SNL).

When it comes to infiltrating pop-culture consciousness, is the Internet now a more influential medium than network television?

"I think that's fair to say, though it's because of the power of SNL that it became as big a thing as it did," hedges Columbia's Sreenivasan. "It was easy for people to say, 'You missed this on SNL.' I think what's interesting is that SNL chose to give it away on iTunes. That was a very smart move, and it made a big difference. They knew this was going to be big — why not get the word out there and make it a really big, big thing. I think it was a lesson to broadcasters who are very timid about using the Internet in a smart way."

Either way, this kind of "toe-dipping" (as Current TV's Sloan likes to call it) — which includes NBC's recent deal with Apple to offer Conan O'Brien and other regularly scheduled programming on iTunes for a fee — isn't going to squelch the organic podcasting realm, argues Adam Curry.

"This is not a matter of 'hurry up and get to market because the train is leaving,'" says the Podshow founder. "There was no train. It's a three-dimensional intergalactic spaceship we're on."

The gist of this high-minded argument is that even Apple, pop-culture trailblazer that it may be, is giving short shrift to the interactive nature of the audiovisual vanguard.

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